These Blood Red Eyes
by Theadle
Summary: Bucky's the war-time child that killed the heart of Steve Rogers - but Steve's stronger than that and Bucky is not as stubborn as they say.


It was on a Wednesday in the middle of March that I first got the message about Bucky - and it was during a raid on a base in the Baltics we'd been securing execution rights to for months from various governing bodies. Hydra had made it especially difficult for us - putting their strongest base on the contested lands of no less than four governments. Georgia even had the land classified as 'cultural hub' - due to an oversight. A cultural hub ... on a cliff-face 9,514 feet up. Anyway - the plan of entry was the easiest thing. Bruce was kind enough to lend us a northern distraction while we waited for the opportune time to enter discreetly through a nearby service entry. As always - there was sensative information waiting for us that was 'required'. The notion that anything from these extremist assholes was necessary for any kind of research made no sense to me, but that's not my job.

I felt a buzz in my thigh indicating that somebody was trying to send me a phone message - which just-so-happened to be the very moment I had a sword pointed at the face of Dr. Enrich Wierdan - otherwise known as the Mockman. I have no idea where that name came from, nor do I care.

"Ah - Mr. Rogers I presume?"

Here we go.

"That's right." The words I said before I unceremoniously smacked him against the wall and cuffed him. Not knowing my own strength - I knocked him out for a moment in the process. "Here - you know what to do." I called behind me towards the leautenent supervising the infiltration.

"I feel like we already know each other so well Steve - I learned all about you from our mutual friend, Dr. Zola!" Of course, Zola had kept a careful database on all prime enemies, not that I liked to see myself that way. "Ah, so you came to pretty quick?" Enrich chuckled as he was being dragged away - soon he'd have a bag over his head keeping him from talking but I supposed that my guys were having trouble enough dragging him out of the room.

"You know - the Winter Soldier is our greatest invention! He will never be Bucky again!"

My boys stopped, having been debriefed about my history and also on Bucky. The personal tension was not forgotten. I simply walked over to the doctor and put the bag over his head and kicked him in the balls. When he keeled over and sought breath, it did not come easy. An oversight on my part."Tony? Is your computer working up there?" Jarvis or Stephanie or whatever he'd named his computer was supposed to be taking information from all the computers automatically - My team had been trained on that so that I wouldn't need to deal with any of the technology. After Tony tried for an hour to accuaint me properly with all the different plugs on today's miraculous computers, I think we both gave up. I've got to admit though - I was the more embarrassed; I felt so stupid. When he'd explain it to me again and again it would all seem so obvious, but I guess I just wasn't all that interested. A voice called into my ear-piece. "Yup - totally. We're getting all the things."

"Good deal." I ran through the corridors I'd memorized on countless maps - and at that moment I couldn't help but appreciate technology. The only way we'd gotten all this intel about the base's layout was because Hydra had a database we were able to stitch together fragmented blueprints from. "Man - in my day we'd be coming in here totally blind." I found a 'friend' running around the corner with a machine gun and knocked him out. "All these enemies would've just been a surprise 50 years ago."

"In your day we would've been using a battering ram and catapults to sack the place." Tony spoke from above. I would've responded, but I was busy trying to keep 14 men safe from alterier explosives and whatnot. It happened that Dr. Wierdan had activated some self-destruct mechanism to destroy all the machineryin the base to keep us from properly understanding where their technology was progressing - but Tony had made leaps and bounds in stopping all the computer codes ans such; so we focused on clearing the area of stragglers instead of escaping. Sure enough, Tony had shut down the sequence not a minute before the detination. "Fantastic work, Tony!" I ran over to the console and removed the big brown iron box behind it like he said - and Agent Royal came in and plugged another couple of sticks into the computer in different places only he knew."You know, Cap. I don't really do anything during missions - I basically sit back and watch while Kat-"

Suddenly, the ear-piece went dead and I looked over my shoulder to one of the masked agents and he signaled indicating it had happened to him too. That was our queue to leave. We ran down in three small groups down slightly different corridors with the mission of leaving the base as soon as mortally possible in case something happened - and sure enough the base had reinforements in the form of little black dots speckling a hillside over to the east. We came out into the open and found three spotters desperately trying to engage in communication. "Commander - you see this?" The man with the binoculars turned to me for only a second. I answered verbally and he began sounding off that there were 46 charlie on sled and another 23 somewhere in the forest hailing gunfire to distract and slow us down. The objective from that point on was to take defensive positions and tear up shop outside. Bruce was about spent it seemed, but he pulled together and literally tore up the surrounding treeline taking care of the gunfire while we focused on the fast-movers. Com broke back in a moment later and Tony was belatedly screaming over the ear-piece that reinforcments were inbound, but that went without saying. SHIELD assets arrived an hour later to obtain and properly detain Hydra resources - and we waited along. Everything was well planned so that I need do very little - questions were sparse and my basic mission was to oversee that everything was done as previously planned. Actually - that was the most exhausting part. There were so many seemingly usless discrepancies in the way certain things were to be packed or handled that had me caught up for hours bouncing back and forth between Developmental Resources and the guys in-field.

Some under-cover agents from the nearby town even tried to pull together a mission last-minute to tear us down, but we were able to take them down, chest-explosives and all- without damaging them or the equipment.

The major curiosity that had me hunched over in the jet on the ride back as I mulled over everything in my mind was how that doctor had hit the nail so well on it's head. To the man's credit - he was right. Bucky had been under the gracious care of neurosugreon Genmo Rex - who just happened to pop up in lieu of Tony's bar-stool challenge to him. "I'll cure this Barnes guy of his amateur 'Borne Identity' situation - and I'll do it without taking a single shower!"

Suffice to say - this was no amateur situation and Rex was apparently unapproachable at the moment due to certain 'workplace discrepancies'. When I got back to base, the staff leader informed me that Bucky had arrived an hour ago and was in the medical bay. I had to ask Romanov to pick through my phone - where she made some crack about me having naughty pictures to which I knew only to laugh and say 'yea right'. They'd always pick on me for not bothering generally with technology- but I never seemed to find a use for it anyway. When I finally arrived at the med bay, Bucky himself looked a lot like I imagined Rex did. Hair was growing everywhere but on his head where it looked like he'd just been shaved for deployment. Poor guy. I was told he wouldn't wake up for another day or so - but I would 'of course' be allowed to stay if desired. Damn right - if they wanted to kick Commander Rogers out of anywhere on the Avengers base - they'd have to screw their heads back on.

I woke up 23 hours later to be informed among the mountain of unfinished papers that had acculumated that Bucky was awake - so I made that first priority. We'd made numerous attempts in the past to use more direct methods of helping him recover - but nothing fruitful had come about. What Rex told us was that he hadn't reallyfelt good about the work he'd done - but only time would tell whther he'd had any positive effect. Humerously - the main objective was that he stay by my side at all times in hopes of being surrounded by something familiar. And although it was considered a major security risk by pretty much everybody - I let it happen; if anybody could handle Bucky Barnes, it was me.

"hello." Bucky said from the bed - despondantly looking at a mirror probably given to him by the doctor. I stood a respectful distance away, smiling warmly. "Hey - how are you feeling?" Bucky looked up for a moment and then back down, chuffing slightly. "I don't feel much of anything. They said I should remember you." my smile dropped slightly and I looked down in aggrivation."Do you?" I asked - to which he responded curtly."No."

"That's OK, I'm sorry they made it seem like an expectation. You don't have to remember anything." I smiled even though he looked slightly frustrated. "No - they've told me to remember a lot of things, like SHIELD and Steve Rogers and Captain America. Are you my superior officer?"

Roy and the other agents on Bucky's research team had told me that was one of Bucky's trigger phrases from Hydra, and that it was always best to say yes - so I did and Bucky seemed to relax a great deal. "It not remember - then what's my assignment sir?" I sighed - suddenly feeling the weight of the task before me. I figured asking him if I could take a seat was ridiculous, so I just did so. "We used to be really good friends before Hydra got it's hands on you - did they tell you?" He looked confused for a moment - "About Hydra, sir?" - "Yes." Bucky looked down and licked his lips. "Yes sir."

"Do you know why we are fighting them?" I wanted to see if even for a moment Bucky understood the political situation he was a part of, however when he looked up at me with those cold-dead eyes, I figured that the whole mess of it meant very little to him. "Hydra is an organization funded by several interests in Russia, North Korea, Cambodia, and India. They are mainly an arms business composed of scientific assets meant to create nuclear warheads for unstable countries willing to pay 12 Billion US dollars or an equivalent amount. They also develop major arms technologies and sell these through intermediates-"

"I understand Buck." I realized I'd let the name slip - and it made me curious. "Sorry, do you know why I called you that." I shook his head calmly after a moment. "No sir."

"It's kinda confusing. We've known each other since we were kids - and the other kids who were friends with you called you Bucky for some reason, apparently because you were hard-headed; I don't know. I still call you that I guess just as a reminder that you weren't always my friend." Bucky looked at me rather sternly, leaned over and said "Is it because of Hydra?" I stared into his eyes very confused. "Sorry?" - "Did Hydra keep us from being friends early on?"

I broke out into laughter - feeling the sad innocence of the situation. I quieted down quickly, remembering that he genuinely didn't understand. Hoping I didn't sound condescending, I stared directly at him and said "This world you see before you hasn't always existed - a long time ago; we were both very different and so was everything else. There wasn't fighting or missions or targets. We were too young to even think about those things - we would just play on the streets; go to school, eat and sleep and be with our parents." Bucky's eyes seemed to shed a layer of haze and suddenly it seemed like the world had opened up for him. "You mean..." There was a long pause during which his eyes gradually darkened, but he never seemed to receed totally back into that initial darkness. "I don't remember any of that. I never knew I had parents. I had parents?"

"Yes, Bucky. You had two parents who loved you."

"Who were they?" He looked so innocent that it almost seemed a crime to deflate it. scarcely remembered his parents because I never saw them, but I remembered his Dad. "I think his name was Ellison." Bucky silently sounded the name out on his lips for a few moments before turning to me again. "So you don't remember my other Dad?"

"Sorry?" I almost felt like, for a moment, that he'd had some spectacular moment of memory hit him but when I asked him to clarify, it seemed instead like he didn't quite get the concept of parents. "You had one Dad and one Mom, that's how kids are made Buck." He sat back and thought for a minute, seeming genuinely thoughtful about all the information. I couldn't help but smile a little at how incredible it was, how little he knew and how much he had to catch up on. I definitely had sympathy for his struggle to come back to the present. A moment after I thought that, I broke into about the deepest laughter I could remember - keeling over and falling off my chair. I could barely handle how pure and powerful the irony of it all was. Wiping away those mirthful tears, I heard from right behind me - "Are you alright, sir?" and a hand on my shoulder-blade. I took a short moment to process that not only had I not been informed that he had full physical capacities, but that he was now right behind me and that I was in a hugely compromising situation. I turned around slightly and smiled back at him "Yea, I'm fine. You know-" I said, beginning to stand and feeling his hands come up to support me, "You really don't need to call me sir." When I was fully stood up and turned around, he still had a hand gently against my torso and was gauging to see if I'd spontaneously burst out again. "Buck." I put my hand over his and stared him down. "I was laughing - it's fine." He nodded slowly and then looked down at what I assumed was both our hands interlocked. "Your abdomen is bleeding." I knew it, but looking down I could see why he was concerned. I chuckled again and shrugged- "I've had worse." He nodded again and sat me down, immediately pulling fresh bandages from behind his gown and opening one. "Lift." I said, indicating to me shirt. For a moment, I did nothing - sat back in total shock and confusion. He simply moved my shirt up and carefully tore off the existing bandage - then retreiving some supplies from his bedside drawer to clean up the mess. I watched as he expertly went through the motions and in no time had everything put together and squarely on my abdomen sat a new bandage with a healthy amount of gause underneath. I almost wasn't able to process all the things he had done because each finger seemed to be doing an interely different thing than the next.

The one thought that came up in my mind was 'he's damn skilled with his hands', a thought which immediately made me hot and bothered. Like a wave, all these feelings came to me that I didn't like - and I immediately shut them out. Unfortunately for me though, Bucky's arms were exposed and they were by no means uninteresting - but I let that out of my mind quietly as well. When he got back up and stood before me - we must have stared at each other for many long moments before I felt hands on my neck. My mind was a little bit slow, but everything caught up when they tightened and breath became scarce. Suddenly, he was choking me and I was staring him straight in his blood-strained eyes - which had no emotion what-so-ever. I felt the force loosen slightly and then not return, which essentially meant that he was firmly holding my neck now instead of choking me, but when he pushed me against the wall with the chair and held me there by the neck - I simply decided to stare. "You ... have 30 seconds ... Buck." Knowing security was watching us both, they'd already sent out an alert. He was still looking at me when He nodded and said "I know." He just kept his hands there, squeezing but not hurting, with the power to end my life but never quite using it.

"Bucky, Steve is your friend and we want you to go to sleep." Said the agents behind us. They were about to shoot when I signaled to them - which under oath they had to take verbatum. I told them to stand down and leave - which they did but not without standing directly outside the door with dart-guns drawn.

"What's going on, Buck?" I kept my eyes on him and gently rested my hands on his arms. He could kill me, and in the moment i wouldn't have minded. The whole situation was rather surreal, me still being physically lethargic from yesterday and then having Bucky give me the essential rundown of his unusual mental and emotional condition - everything had morphed into this rare and unsual cocktail that was more of a drug than any alchohol I'd refused to have. So, when he let go of me and walked back over to the bed - I decided to just sit back again and say nothing. He was busy adjusting himself in the bed when he asked me one final question, which was "What's my name, sir?" I figured he meant his actual birth name, so I obliged. "James Buchanan Barnes, and mine's Steve Rogers in case you'd like to start using it, which I'd recommend." He seemed to stare into space for a few long moments and as I was walking to the door, he sort-of grumbled "Steve Rogers, you're more thick than I ever was." I refused to look back, because for a moment that man behind me was not Bucky or the Winter Soldier or anybody else I knew - but rather someone totally new. I couldn't see that person as either of them. "Hey - you should keep the beard look, by the way." Without looking at him again, I left and went back to my room three floors up for a nice big gallon of chocolate milk and a nap before descending back into the real hell that was my life.


End file.
